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US Air Force plans to pluck dangerous drones out of the skies

New drones can fly without human control, so there is no signal to jam to stop them if they are a threat. Trained falcons, lasers and net-launching bazookas may help

Take down

Andrew Testa/NYT/Redux/eyevine

By David Hambling

HOW do you bring a bad drone down? New kinds of drones that can fly autonomously can’t be stopped with traditional techniques, the US Air Force has warned. It has put out a call for ideas to yank drones out of the sky.

Millions of drones are sold each year. Most are flown for fun, but a few have been put to criminal use: carrying cameras to bedroom windows, flying into secure airspace over nuclear power stations, and smuggling contraband into prisons.

There are also fears for public safety, after a number of near misses with commercial aircraft. Some terrorist groups are reported to have experimented with turning drones into flying bombs.

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The typical counter to this threat is to jam the signal between the drone and its operator. For example, Colorado-based firm Liteye Systems is developing a drone-jamming defence for US airports. And French authorities have drone-jamming devices at all 10 of the stadiums hosting the Euro 2016 football tournament.

But when a drone can fly on its own, there is no operator’s signal to jam. So the US Air Force has put out a call for proposals to detect and defeat autonomous drones that are resistant to jamming.

While simply blowing the drone out of the sky may seem attractive, this could detonate an explosive payload or release chemical or biological weapons, warns the US Air Force. Instead, it wants ways to capture drones physically, taking them out of the sky with minimal force.

The SkyWall100, developed by UK company OpenWorks Engineering, does exactly this. It’s a bazooka-like launcher that fires a net projectile. The net envelops the drone, then safely parachutes it to the ground.

Robert Bunker, a counterterrorism expert at TRENDS Research & Advisory in Abu Dhabi, says that there are likely to be two distinct occasions when autonomous drones need to be stopped: for public safety and during war.

Public safety is the more challenging arena. Bunker says that dealing with drones in public spaces requires approaches that have a low risk of inadvertently harming bystanders.

These will include net launchers like SkyWall, net-carrying drones such as those deployed by Japanese police in Tokyo last year, and possibly even trained birds of prey, which Dutch police have tested as a means of safely catching drones (see photo).

Military operations are different. Here, Bunker suggests counter-drone weapons will draw on more violent existing capabilities like the C-RAM system used in Iraq. This shoots threats out of the sky with a stream of 20 millimetre cannon fire. Its challenge will be spotting and targeting small, autonomous drones as they approach.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Plucked from the skies”